You couldn’t get a much blander statement than the one from DRM intellectual property leader Intertrust this week which said simply that Adobe had entered into a license agreement for its content protection technology.
There was very little more detail than that, but still it is electrifyingly exciting. Over the past six years or so the fight to control Digital Rights Management technology has waged, with Microsoft bundling technology into its media player, Apple hiding its music content behind Fairplay and legal wranglings both between Microsoft and Intertrust and its parent companies Sony and Philips, and also between the MPEG LA patent pool for DRM, and the entire cellular industry.
Often it has been hard to see where it will all lead and just what the future for DRM is. The technology is essential, but the it has to be innocuous and user friendly. We once wrote that Microsoft had the power to create yet another $40 billion empire if it could manage to force every consumer electronics company, PC maker and handset creator to license its DRM platform, giving it a de facto common platform across all three screens ‘ the TV, PC and handset. That has been the problem with embracing Windows Media DRM, and it has largely NOT been embraced except by those following the lazy model of business school (many of the failed online video download stores use Windows Media DRM).
But the prospect of Adobe producing its own DRM, whether this is inspired by the skeleton coding of the Intertrust Marlin DRM, or whether Adobe writes its own code from scratch, means that there will shortly be a media player that supports cheap and easy to implement video, which has best in class DRM support from glass to glass, from film lens right the way through to viewing. It will be free, just like Windows Media DRM, and but unlike the Microsoft product it doesn’t present an intellectual property threat to all of the consumer electronics businesses, all the handset makers and all the PC suppliers. Adobe’s business model of the player being free, and the software tools that are used to create or prepare content or design being where it makes its money, means that everyone can get on with just buying into the Adobe media player, to the potential exclusion of Microsoft.
In order to support that business model Intertrust will have had to have signed a similar deal to the one that it signed with Microsoft, when after three years of litigation, the two settled their differences out of court with a $440 million payment to Intertrust, which included a ten year license to the Intertrust patents. Microsoft can give away Windows Media DRM on any of its own platforms (so not on Linux or on Symbian handsets), but the equivalent for Adobe will mean any device that supports Flash and Flash Lite, and this currently includes PCs, and around 270 million handsets.
Taking a step back into the Adobe vision, it’s simple. When it invented postscript and then the PDF format, Adobe worked out how to electronically describe a document in a way that was extremely light in terms of data traffic. It added protection technologies and creation tools. Now just replace documents with video and that’s its new strategy. It’s not rocket science to see that coming, but to some extent it is rocket science actually getting the job done.
One of the stages has been the creation of what it calls Adobe Integrated Runtime Environment or AIR. This is an engine that sits on a PC, a Mac and later a Linux box or a handset, which shares the workload with a server in serving up multimedia experiences across the internet (read video plus Flash plus pdf plus html). So a single service can talk to multiple screens, and this is the layer that sits under the Media Player, which is already out in beta and which will launch at year end.
The run time takes care of the differences between environments, and other applications, like the Media Player will be common across platforms. This is what Microsoft was after for the past five years, but couldn’t deliver on. Not because it can’t produce the code to make it happen, but because in its world it needs a piece of every link in the chain. It was chasing a few dollars per device in licensing fees, because when you are a $40 billion company, that’s the only way to make a dent in your required growth rate. Adobe instead gives it away on all platforms and everyone is happy.
The Adobe Media Player was first shown at NAB earlier this year, and analysts and journalists alike yawned and passed it over for comment. They shouldn’t have done. The idea is to take all those multimedia tools such as Premiere, Director, Framemaker, Authorware, Creative Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash Media Server and a host of others, and use them to create content. At that point it should become easy to deploy whether or not you want to drop it onto celluloid, store it in on a disk for VoD, broadcast it, or show it from a web site. Make once, deploy anywhere is a familiar call to arms.
The beauty of this coming from Adobe, is that no-one in the food chain feels threatened by an encroaching giant. Sure it has wrested control of web video from Microsoft, so that company is upset and wants to get it back, hence the Silverlight iteration of its media products, designed as an Adobe Flash look alike. This is also an assault on Apple, which for years has slowly insinuated itself into the professional film making process. But everyone else is likely to welcome Adobe with open arms and the media player will have a huge impact on web video and streamed cellular video, and who knows, even on TV set tops.
Mostly Adobe Media Player is about combining Flash Video in new ways with other Flash animations, into new business models. Instead of interrupting video on the web to show adverts, a video or static ad can be inserted to run OVER an existing piece of video, perhaps in a darkened corner not showing much of the action right at that second. Click on it and the video stream will stop and the viewer can watch the ad. Click back on the stream and it continues as if nothing had happened.
We come across companies that want to do this all the time in the experimental world of web video, especially as ad supported video services are coming into play. They want to buy off the advert, freeze a video experience so none is lost, or mark ads for later viewing. This is already common on the internet, but it’s not common yet on web video. Why write it yourself, use an off the shelf product, and Adobe will make money out of selling the server software, and everything else in the experience will be free.
One thing that was missing from this was a trusted DRM so that Adobe Flash, which is already used for most of YouTube and many of the User Generated Content sites, can be used with professional, fee bearing content. It must be possible for streams to be backed up onto a hard drive and yet there be no opportunity to pirate the ad carrying video content, strip out the ads and leave it around the internet for anyone to watch, with no protection.
Last year the world was treated to paid online video services and they flopped. As everyone is looking for a set of support tools for the next business model, with ad support, which can bridge TV screens, PCs and handsets, along comes Adobe, right on time. The one missing ingredient was the pedigree of the DRM and the Intertrust release just filled in the missing pieces.